Hunger: A Novel [Paperback]

Knut Hamsun (Author), Robert Bly (Translator), Paul Auster (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 19, 2008

A true classic of modern literature that has been described as “one of the most disturbing novels in existence” (Time Out), Hunger is the story of a Norwegian artist who wanders the streets, struggling on the edge of starvation. As hunger overtakes him, he slides inexorably into paranoia and despair. The descent into madness is recounted by the unnamed narrator in increasingly urgent and disjointed prose, as he loses his grip on reality.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Something new is happening here, some new thought about the nature of art is being proposed in Hunger. An art that is indistinguishable from the life of the artist who makes it . . . an art that is the direct expression of the effort to express itself." --Paul Auster (from his introduction)

"The whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun. They were all Hansun's disciples: Thomas Mann and Arthur Schnitzler . . . and even such American writers as Fitzgerald and Hemingway." --Isaac Bashevis Singer

"After reading Hunger, one can easily understand why Hamsun was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Hunger should appeal to any reader who is interested in a masterpiece by one of this century's great novelists." --James Goldwasser, Detroit News

About the Author

Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) was a Norwegian novelist, poet, and playwright.  He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (February 19, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374531102
• ISBN-13: 978-0374531102
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #27,374 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Man desperately seeking a happy meal..., November 14, 2008

By 

Mark Nadja "Literary Outlaw, author *Hardcore... (New York City) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Hunger: A Novel (Paperback)

Knut Hamsun's *Hunger* is a powerful study of a man too intelligent and too sensitive for his own good--or anyone else's for that matter. He's a younger version of Dostoyevsky's "underground man" driven by Poe's "imp of the perverse." Living hand-to-mouth, always down to his last kroner, reeling dizzy from hunger, Hamsun's narrator, a freelance journalist and would-be litterateur, is part crank, part brilliant eccentric whose hypersensitivity and untimely observations of the shortcomings of human nature seem to insure his failure among the society he loathes.

The victim as well as the author of his own misfortunes, the hero--properly speaking, the anti-hero--of *Hunger* can't even stumble into good fortune without somehow sabotaging himself. He pushes himself to indulge in the most offensive and inappropriate public behavior so compulsively you begin to wonder if he isn't insane, especially inasmuch as he often engages himself in conversation and goads himself to self-destruction as if he were really talking to and arguing with another person altogether. He even manages to spoil the beginnings of a most improbable love-affair with a woman who finds herself intrigued by such a strange and haunted man.

Is his poverty, his periodic homelessness, his ever-present hunger a consequence of his schizoid behavior or is his schizoid behavior a consequence of his hunger, grinding poverty, and brutal degradation at the hands of a society that doesn't recognize the geniuses among it? The question is left open to debate and that's one of the things that makes *Hunger* such an endlessly compelling novel.

By articulating such questions and outlining the contours of alienation, Hamsun paints a bleak landscape where genius struggles between mediocrity and madness and where each of us is not much more than a ham sandwich away from being swallowed up by utter destitution.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "I will make my character laugh", May 29, 2010

By 

technoguy "jack" (Rugby) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hunger: A Novel (Paperback)

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.
Thus Auden ("In memory of WB Yeats").

Hamsun's hero in Hunger is restless,provocative,insolent,egotistical,given to swoops of joyful lyricism and the utmost humiliation and despair as he begs,borrows,starves,lies and cheats his way through his days in Kristiana in the late 19th century. His moods are always changing like the weather,laughing, shouting,talking to himself, crying, angry.His bouts of starvation empty and hollow him out,make him hallucinate,give him delusions of writing the next masterpiece,a refutation of Kant in 3 parts,which he doesn't do,but it gives his feverish mind a goal.The main poles of his existence are the Editor,his Landlord,the Baker and the Pawnshop.Not forgetting the policeman.

His lies become as truthful to him as the truth and he acts them out. God both exists for him to rail at, or doesn't exist. Andreas Tangen(we only learn his name half way through) most definitely does exist! He starves for the next crust of bread, while searching for work,he also starves for inspiration to write. He swings between pride and humility. His pride will not allow him to take money when he needs it, and makes him charitable when he can't afford it.He pawns the clothes off his back to give the money to another wretch.He perverts and distorts the Christian ethic, and, as in Doestoyevsky's Notes from the Underground,has hopes of gaining salvation through degradation and suffering.

His attention is seized by everything,riding on a chain of moods through the back streets of Kristiana,'flies and gnats stuck to the paper...I blew on them to make them go away,then blew harder and harder,but it was no use. The little pests lean back and make themselves heavy,putting up such a struggle that their thin legs bend.' He is given over to bouts of elation while writing. He sucks on stones when he is hungry. He wanders aimlessly in Hamsun's plotless novel,his poverty becomes a lodestone of wealthy perceptions.Every now and then the Editor takes pity and gives him money for an article,which lasts a few days,then the starvation all begins again.

Without the stub of a pencil he is lost.His clothes are thread-bare and shabby. He plays pranks on women to embarrass them.He has fun at other people's expense.He invents new words and new names. He is at one with animate and inanimate nature in her changing cycles.We do not get the sociology of hunger as in Orwell(`Down and Out in Paris and London') but we get the physiology and the effects on the unconscious. Tangen is an aristocrat of the spirit,grandiose and self-elevating. He moves and annoys us.This novel explores the dark nether regions of the human mind in its overture tothe 20th century.This masterpiece,the birth-pangs of a genius.Robert Bly's translation
is energetic and poetic,if not always technically accurate.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bukowski's Cathedral, April 16, 2010

By 

D. Scott "D. Scott" (Athens, GA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Hunger: A Novel (Paperback)

I picked up Hunger because I am a fan of Charles Bukowski's writing, and he mentions several times in his works that Knut Hamsun is his favorite author. After finishing Hunger, I understand why - its main character is very real, intensely psychological, living through what he must, learning what he has to learn to heal some broken part of himself. I now realize Bukowski took these themes for his work and made them his own. In the excellent afterword to this edition (must reading), Robert Bly says "...Hunger is a cathedral. It is a cathedral because the whole novel is a resonating chamber for an unknown part of the personality." The central focus of Hunger is precisely what is not there - the part of the main character's personality that makes him do the things he does, the unconscious. Where do the impulses of the unconscious come from, and what do they say about us and about the times in which we live?

Written in 1890, Hunger was a new kind of novel for the 20th century, later influencing Hemingway, Saramago, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Camus, and many others. Hunger is not symbolic. The main character is really hungry as he wanders the streets of Christiana (Oslo) with little in his pockets but a pencil nub and a few sheets of paper on which to write another article he hopefully can sell to the newspaper for a few kroner. He goes for days without eating, writes feverishly, wanders the streets at all times of day and night, contemplates eating his own pockets, tries to pawn the buttons off his own coat, sells some articles, is OK for a while, and then starves again. At times the protagonist seems to lapse into insanity, giving what little he has away and seemingly subverting his own efforts. At other times he appears to be a genius. In the words of Samuel Beckett, this is a type of writing that "admits the chaos and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else."

Hunger's unnamed main character is drawn from Hamsun's own 10 years of being down and out on the streets of Christiana. Hamsun's character was new and shocking because he trusts and obeys the impulses of his unconscious with no judgment, hysteria, or self pity, in direct contradiction to the mainstream literature of the day. Robert Bly states that "there is a sense throughout the entire novel that his starvation was somehow planned by his unconscious - that somehow his unconscious has chosen suffering as a way for some part of him to get well." He goes on to say that "His obedience to the unconscious, even at the cost of physical suffering, is the right thing; it is the road of genius and learning."

In Hunger, we haunt the city streets with Hamsun, live in his mind, and never really leave. Highly recommended.